A long CNN report piggybacking on the NBC News report from earlier this week regarding the chaos and disarray inside the White House.
The country seems divided but, apparently, the real divisions are occurring in the West Wing where aides who have spent decades around Biden fret and fight with aides that weren’t born yet when Biden was conducting hearings for newly-nominated Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s.
How best to present Biden to the American people, a question that the “smartest people in the room” still can’t seem to answer. The man has literally lived decades inside Washington yet still seems to be trying to acclimate to the job of Commander in Chief.
Reading some of these excerpts from the CNN piece is truly remarkable and opens the door to what’s going on inside the halls of power as the nation watches with a bewildered look from the outside:
Being familiar never makes the feeling less dreadful: White House aides emailing each other during one of President Joe Biden’s stops on the road, tracking who’s covering what he’s saying, which TV channels are taking the speech live – and realizing a number of times that the answer was none.
“You are thinking,” said one person familiar, “why are we doing this?”
Biden and his inner circle get weekly readouts of the metrics on local newspaper coverage of his speeches, how long and for what he was covered on cable, but also videos that staff post on Twitter and other social media interactions. Those reports go on the piles with internal memos from pollsters saying Biden isn’t breaking through in traditional news outlets and that the people who are engaged are mostly voters who’ve already made up their minds.
What that all basically says is most of America has tuned Biden out. They’re not interested in “his take” on the issues, they know he has nothing more to offer and has already failed test after test of presidential leadership. No one’s watching because they know there’s nothing worth watching when Biden gives a speech in Sheboygan about infrastructure funding or “lowering costs for families.”
This section is truly remarkable:
At the center is a president still trying to calibrate himself to the office. The country is pulling itself apart, pandemic infections keep coming, inflation keeps rising, a new crisis on top of new crisis arrives daily and Biden can’t see a way to address that while also being the looser, happier, more sympathetic, lovingly Onion-parody inspiring, aviator-wearing, vanilla chip cone-licking guy – an image that was the core of why he got elected in the first place.
“He has to speak to very serious things,” explained one White House aide, “and you can’t do that getting ice cream.”
Joe Biden, the man who ran a campaign based on his experience and being “ready on day one” is still calibrating himself to the job? Many observers warned that Biden wasn’t up to the challenge, hence the reason why former President Obama stepped in and pushed him aside in 2016 to help Hillary Clinton take a run as extending the Obama presidency. Obama knew Biden couldn’t handle it.
Perhaps the best word to describe Joe Biden is “aloof,” an image he’s never been able to shake or cast aside. He’s not so much “cold” to issues as he is simply removed from them. If he’s told something, he assumes everyone should digest it the way he does, so he ends up with his angry whispering tone scolding the American people like a disgruntled grandpa.
The disconnected caricature of Biden is also shared among White House aides:
Yet Biden keeps showing up behind the same podiums surrounded by the same big screens, talking from a remove about what he feels and what he wants to do about it. He’s coming across disconnected, aides have acknowledged to allies in Congress and beyond. And then, they say, the same events keep getting planned.
“World’s most interactive man,” sighed one person familiar with White House operations after one of the recent events, “and we’re going to have him conduct the presidency from the set of Jeopardy.”
Biden still seems to be permanently set apart from the American people, perhaps as a result of Covid-19 and continuing fear that someone of his age, even quadruple vaccinated, could suffer potentially lethal complications from an infection.
Whatever the case is, the politics-by-Tik-Tok isn’t helping, either:
Excited as White House aides were by the appearance by the K-pop superstars BTS showing up at the daily press briefing on Tuesday, with more than 180,000 people watching the live stream at one point and fans pressed up against the security gates asking what the singers smelled like, they also acknowledged the downside some wish would be more instructive: That brief BTS visit will likely be seen more than anything Biden will do for weeks.
Sure, get the teeny boppers fired up about inflation policy. The only problem is that they can’t vote and don’t care. The people Biden needs to reach are working-class voters, suburban families, and middle-class households getting eaten alive but his policies. Those voters are not tuning in to watch something called “BTS” invade the White House on a Tik Tok live stream.
It’s a long read from CNN but intriguing from a political junky perspective. How can someone like Biden, with the resources of the Obama years, be swallowed so wholly by a job he’s spent decades trying to reach?
The issues are twofold.
First, Biden isn’t nearly as endearing as he seems when he’s actually in charge. Yes, he’s the “grandfather” figure in the country, but that also means he’s somewhat disconnected from the issues and problems facing young families and middle-class voters with children, education concerns, rising fuel prices, etc… Biden is way past all those life stages. High gas prices aren’t touching his bottom line, so who cares? Buy an electric vehicle, they say.
Second, Biden’s policies are simply awful. It doesn’t matter how many times you look into the camera to “empathize” with someone who must limit their gas tank to $20 in order to afford rising grocery costs, your policies simply don’t work. That point can’t be overstated.
Any of the White House aides fooling themselves into thinking they just aren’t selling Biden and his policies correctly are fooling themselves into thinking they actually have good policies to sell. They simply don’t, and the inflation coupled with numerous other problems have proven that out since Biden’s inauguration.
A staff shakeup in the White House seems inevitable. Casting aside young, woke aides in favor of experience seems like a place to start. Abandoning the left-wing lunacy would also be a step similar to that of Bill Clinton in 1995 after losing big in the 1994 midterms.
Will Biden pivot? Probably not, but it makes for entertaining politics.
